Interlude: Jujutsu Society Debut Part 2 (Final part)

Part 2

Shigemo still didn’t want to talk to Haruta as they settled in their seats. He switched seats each time she came to sit near him, befuddling the rest of the students. They no doubt all thought that she was an obsessed girl with a crush harassing the boy, but she didn’t care.

Eventually, he sat next to two people, all of them blocking Haruta away from him.

That wasn’t too bad. They could still talk with her Juchū, even during class.

There were two classes in the first year, and it was just her luck that she was in the same one as Shigemo. Also her luck that Naoya and Joichi went to the same class as her—though Joichi was still absent for the time being. Naoya didn’t even bother to look at her for the most part. He was likely biding time for the Jujutsu lesson at the end of the day.

Their homeroom teacher, an unimpressive assistant manager, explained to them how their first day would look. Mid-speech, he was interrupted with Joichi slamming the sliding door to the room to the side, glaring daggers into the room. “Harutaaaaaa!” he roared.

Shigemo looked at him in pure, unbridled panic. “Wait, wait, big bro, that wasn’t me, I promise!”

The teacher immediately walked up to Joichi. “Hey, now, Yamamoto-san, you’re late for your first lesson—“ pushed the manager, flinging him into the wall, shattering it in the process.

“I’ll rip your heart out, Haruta! You’re dead! You’re fucking dead!”

Haruta watched in amusement as Shigemo looked between Joichi and herself, as if considering which poison to pick.

Shigemo chose right in the end. He ran across the classroom, behind Haruta’s seated form, and crouched next to it, shivering as he did. “Please help me. My friend! I don’t hate you after all!”

She stood up then, grinning brilliantly at Joichi. “I’m the one you’re after! My name is Hibana Haruta, and I was the one that knocked your face into that tree! Back for round two?!”

The cursed energy within Joichi flared, and Haruta prepared for the fight of her life.

By this point, almost every one of the students had evacuated to the sidelines of the classroom, many of them deathly afraid by what they had just witnessed—a teacher being effortlessly dispatched. As a sorcerer, even one as unimpressive as an assistant manager, it was unlikely that the strike had claimed his life. Still, for many of the students, this was their first ever view of a jujutsu battle, and how destructive they could get.

Haruta didn’t hesitate as she summoned her biggest, baddest merged Juchū. Dog-sized hornets with scorpion pincers filled the air. Between them, a swarm of hundreds of sensory Juchū, immediately inundating her with a deluge of information, enough to have her map every inch of the room with her eyes closed.

Yamamoto Joichi’s eyes grew blood-red, covering the pupils, iris, and sclera. The redness extended past the bounds of his eyes, into five points like red face paint of twin stars.

He dashed forth.

Haruta already knew that this attack would be impossible to block. He was too heavy and too fast for her to recruit her cursed energy in time.

But she could recruit it in time to step aside, allowing him to fly through the wall, out the building, and into the courtyard below.

Blood Manipulation. Flowing Red Scale.

Joichi was surnamed Yamamoto, but there was no doubting that in time, the Kamo clan would swallow him up. He was one of the raw sorcerers that Teira-sama had located, and was very likely descended from Kamo blood.

Haruta burned Juchū through Arthropodal Aspect to grow dragonfly wings on her back as she prepared to float above the air in the courtyard.

Sorcerer clans practiced selective breeding in order to ensure that their children inherited the best of both cursed energy and cursed technique. Those with low amounts of cursed energy were shunned, sometimes cut loose entirely to live among non-sorcerers.

It didn’t matter how impressive one’s innate technique was, in isolation. One could have the most miraculous innate technique out there, and it would mean less than nothing at all if one’s cursed energy was too feeble to support it. Thus it followed that while many of those people cut loose by the great clans might inherit famous innate techniques, but they would still remain useless Jujutsu Sorcerers.

Yamamoto Joichi should have been one such example.

He looked up at her floating form and laughed. “Okay… you want to play? Let’s play!”

Wings of blood shot out from his back, taking on a bat-like aspect. They were five meters in wingspan, dwarfing his vertical height. He flapped them, and easily managed to float into the air.

The amount of blood in those wings were more than any human body should contain.

But he was not done.

A spear made of blood extruded itself from his palm. It grew up to seven feet long before he grabbed it, and pointed it at her with a malicious leer.

He flapped his wings, and shot towards her.

Just as he did, she summoned some tools of her own.

Teira-sama’s weapon-type Juchū were more useful against cursed spirits than other humans. This was by design—Teira-sama wanted to discourage fighting among sorcerers, for obvious reasons. Still, that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t occasionally hand out weapons useful against sorcerers, to those that she trusted most deeply.

Hibana Haruta was proud to say that she was one such person.

In her hand, she held an Injector Sword, pink like all her Juchū were. The inside of the double-edged sword’s length was filled with a potent venom. Just grazing someone with the tip would pump them full of toxins that eroded cursed energy and cursed techniques.

She managed to deflect Joichi’s spear by the skin of her teeth, nicking his shoulder while she was at it.

It was barely even a graze, however. He had reacted too quickly, dodged away in time to prevent the tip of her blade from properly breaking his skin.

Her hornet Juchū attacked before he could mount a counter-attack. She used his momentary distraction as an opportunity to create distance.

Tendrils of sharp blood extruded from his spear, instantly cutting apart her Juchū.

One blood tendril even managed to graze her.

Adaptable.

Historically, Blood Manipulators rarely ever received the distinction of being named Special Grade.

Yamamoto Joichi was different for three reasons.

One of Haruta’s hornets managed to get past his guard, ripping a gouge on his bicep that would have made his right arm useless, if he hadn’t manipulated blood to retain his strength. Then, moments later, the wound began to knit itself back together. Joichi pursued her then.

He was one of the few people blessed by the heavens enough to have the Reverse Cursed Technique.

With that, he managed to circumvent the greatest weakness of Blood Manipulation—namely, how much blood he had to work with.

Now, instead of being limited by the blood in his body, he was limited by how much cursed energy he could use to regenerate his blood.

Haruta parried and deflected each strike of his polearm for dear life. Evidently, he wasn’t able to extrude its tendrils without stopping his assault, which was just her luck. If he hadn’t been so angry, and been more calm and levelheaded, the fight would have been over already.

Haruta couldn’t fight him at his fullest potential.

More Juchū swarmed him, ripping him up and injecting him with venom, giving her an opportunity to regain more distance and think things more clearly.

As she did, he once again turned his polearm into a blender of razor-sharp blood tendrils that ripped through all of her Juchū. She did not look forward to the conversation she’d have with Teira-sama regarding her replacements.

She watched him regenerate without issue, which made her consider the second thing that made him too damn powerful. Namely, his cursed energy.

He had a lot of it.

Far, far more than the average sorcerer, definitely. Between the output that he could infuse into his body, and the technique that made his movements powerful—the Flowing Red Scale if she recalled correctly—he was a monster of close quarters combat. And his cursed energy stores made him a nightmare to whittle down.

That was where the venom came in.

Joichi stiffened in the air. His bat-wings froze, causing him to fall down to the ground.

There’s my chance!

Teira-sama had trained her on how to deal with anyone that had the Reverse Cursed Technique. The answer was to use toxins. The Reverse Cursed Technique could not easily filter out toxins, as that was a negative effect. Positive energy worked through addition, not subtraction. As long as he didn’t know how to counter this weakness, then she would have a chance to win.

She positioned her Injector Sword such that it would impale him through his abdomen and pump him full of enough cursed technique venom to leave him half-dead and fighting for survival. If she could strike at his core, he would be too focused on survival to continue fighting. And with the Reverse Cursed Technique in play, he could make a full recovery. In time.

She was mere meters away from him, lying on his back on the ground in an enormous puddle of blood that his wings had melted into. Time seemed to slow the closer she got, the more she sharpened her senses. Her senses sharpened to an impractical extent, and she was fighting against her own impatience.

The end was near, and she needed all the focus she could muster in order to ensure that no last-minute surprises occurred.

Surprises such as him using Blood Manipulation to slit his own throat.

Surprises like a jet of blood spraying out from his throat in an unending, furious avalanche that turned into a shell-shaped wave of power bursting forth from him, and striking her like a physical blow as it blew her away.

Haruta understood what he had done, even though she wasn’t any less surprised by the grit that it had taken to do such a thing.

In a fraction of a second, Yamamoto Joichi had evacuated all of his poisoned blood from his body, freeing himself from the corruptive influence of the cursed technique venom. In that same moment, he used the Reverse Cursed Technique to keep himself alive and replenish his blood.

Teira-sama had taught her this, as well—the counter that she, herself, had used to overcome the Reverse Cursed Technique’s weakness against venom, like the ones imbued in the Hornet Stinger cursed tools that the old clan head had used to almost kill her.

To simply bleed the venom out.

It was a simple solution, but one that was extremely complex in execution, and required an incredible mindset to perform.

The third thing that made Yamamoto Joichi a Special Grade—his mentality. Adaptability, ruthlessness, focus—he had it all.

Teira-sama had learned as much from when she had sat in on his interview with Jujutsu High’s higher-ups, where they had tested his potential as a sorcerer by making him face off against a Special Grade curse. It wasn’t a toxin-type—otherwise, Haruta would have been prepared for this.

But it had pushed him to his limits, and he had broken through those limits like it was natural.

Joichi was a monster.

Once the wave of blood let up, she saw Joichi shakily getting to his feet as he replenished his blood. Haruta couldn’t let this opportunity slip by. He was still weak. She had to push ahead.

She couldn’t bank on the fact that his cursed energy might be running low. Hers most certainly was. The flight to Kyoto had taken too much out of her, and the way she poured cursed energy into her Juchū in order to make them keep up with the scale of this battle meant that she was already running on trickles.

She needed to end this all at once.

One strike. One blow powerful enough to shatter him.

She couldn’t hold back. Couldn’t try to ensure his survival. She was reasonably certain that he meant to kill her. It was all she could sense from him—an overwhelming malevolence in everything that he did.

She flew towards him, pushing all the energy that she could into her wings, and into her fist.

Joichi glared at her in pure hatred as he held his arms up to block her, encasing them in solid, red blood.

The moment before she struck, something changed—

“Domain Expansion: Tranquility of the Pure Lands.”

What—

The world instantly became a garden of lotuses floating above a tranquil pool on the ground. The sky was golden, and giant golden Buddha statues surrounded them on four sides.

And atop one raised Lotus flower, a man stood, dressed in a school uniform meant to evoke the style of monk robes.

Haruta’s fist crashed into Joichi’s upraised arm with considerably less force than normal, as she was already diverting all of her focus into a barrier technique.

The Simple Domain—a technique that Teira-sama had copied from the New Shadow Style school.

Haruta had practiced it under Teira-sama’s supervision. She had even tested it while under the effects of a Domain Expansion.

Unfortunately, as she positioned her feet and her arms, as if to draw her sword, the technique’s barrier dissipated harmlessly in the air.

She had run out of cursed energy.

And battle was now the last thing on her mind.

She looked between the new figure and Joichi languidly, waiting for death. To fight was forbidden, after all. Violence was forbidden as it went against the Right Action.

She would sooner be killed by Joichi than to go against the Right Action.

Joichi’s arms fell to his side, and his malevolence disappeared.

Haruta could breathe easily. He, too, had found enlightenment, in the end.

“That’s quite enough,” the unknown figure said. “My cute kouhai.”

To that, Haruta could only nod. The path of violence and bloodshed was far behind her.

000

Haruta fell on her knees and panted when the Domain fell. Just as it did, a group of grown-up sorcerers had already chained up Joichi in iron chains covered with paper talismans.

When Joichi shouted in protest, one of the sorcerers slapped a talisman on his forehead, and he fell asleep.

As they dragged him away, Haruta’s senpai offered her a hand. He was a bald, kind-eyed young man, and even his smile evoked a sense of security in Haruta.

“Quite the scary fight, that was,” he said as he helped her up. She felt physically ill. That was likely the foreign blood still in her system from when Joichi had grazed her. Still, she summoned an antivenom Juchū and drank from its contents, hoping that it would heal her up, or at least stop her from getting worse. “Don’t worry. I’ll speak up for you. That young man gravely injured his teacher, after all. I’m sure that they will brand him a criminal for this.”

More likely than not, the big clans would just try to break him and recruit his power. Haruta understood the political situation of Jujutsu Society well. They could not afford to throw Joichi away.

At the very least, it would buy her time to get stronger, until the next time she met him.

“I had things under control,” she muttered weakly. “I could have beaten him.”

“Possible, albeit quite unlikely. But that’s besides the simple fact that you shouldn’t be fighting your classmates in the first place. Come. Let me take you to the infirmary. No harm shall befall you on the way.”

“I’m not a child,” she said.

“Aren’t we all children?” he grinned. “Apologies. I often find myself very protective of my kouhai. That isn’t to say that I view you as a child, but rather that I take my responsibility as a senpai seriously. Ah—I’ve forgotten myself. My name is Daimonji Matsuda.”

Daimonji Matsuda. Special Grade fourth-year of Kyoto High. One of the earliest among Teira-sama’s many raw sorcerer finds. He had gone through all four years of Jujutsu High, even.

His baselines had been strong from the start, but now, even he had the power of a Domain Expansion.

While she was grateful that he would speak up for her, she looked far less forward to answering to Teira-sama.

“Hibana Haruta,” She said.

“Excellent. Let’s go, now.”

She followed his lead without any more questions.

000

“So in summary, my charge was savagely attacked by the very same sorcerer-in-training that the Kyoto school insisted on bringing in, and now there are threats of disciplinary measures against her when she could have died. In the meanwhile, one of the assistant managers were critically injured through no fault of my charge. Do I have that right?”

Haruta sat besides Teira’s ambassador Juchū inside Principal Gakuganji’s office, on a low couch. The old man sat opposite to them on another couch as well, between them a table with no refreshments. The wing of Teira-sama was furled, but she could steal feel the fuzz on her side, due to how short the sofa was.

“She did provoke him,” Gakuganji argued.

“By saving another student from his wrath.”

“By attacking him full-force in a surprise attack is more accurate to say,” Gakuganji said.

“And I assume that attack knocked all the morals and ethics out of his mind, enough to inspire him to injure a teacher. Gakuganji-sensei, I understand that children shouldn’t be expected to fight in the confines of a Jujutsu school, but we both know that such a thing is utterly unavoidable. That’s why fighting isn’t even an offence worthy of a suspension, much less an expulsion. One cannot reasonably assume that anything pertaining to that hellion could have resulted from something as trite as provocation. He has always been a special case. Haruta, however, does not warrant any further disciplinary action such as the ones that would prevent her from attending school in any capacity.”

Gakuganji sighed. “The entrance ceremony has been interrupted due to this incident. I need not remind you how important tradition is to us.”

“The entrance ceremony barely existed before the last few years, principal.”

“Be that as it may, the ceremony is important. Ensuring a smooth transition to the world of Jujutsu Sorcery to the young hopefuls is of the utmost importance.”

“Indeed, it is. And you have Joichi to blame for its disruption. Do with him as you please. I care not. But leave Haruta out of it. She was a victim of his aggression.”

It rankled Haruta’s pride to be designated a victim.

“That is understandable,” Gakuganji said. “But an example must be made. Otherwise, the children will lose confidence in our authority.”

“Then allow her to express her regrets and explain her situation to the student body,” Teira said. “She will make no apology for her conduct, however. She did nothing wrong, and I will not tolerate any implication otherwise. We can work together to repair the damage done to the administration’s image, but I refuse to sacrifice Haruta’s dignity in that regard.”

Haruta balled her fists at that.

She didn’t know if she should feel grateful or regretful at having Teira defend her like this. She honestly wouldn’t have minded just apologizing publicly, either.

This was excessive.

“Fine,” the principal said. “We can work together, then. Thank you for your time, Hibana-sama.”

Teira nodded and stood up. Haruta followed a beat later, and they left the room.

Just as they did, Haruta spoke, “I’m sorry—“

“I’m sorry.”

Haruta felt too stunned to speak.

“I thought that Joichi could push you to greater heights. Instead, I placed you, and all the other students in this school, in mortal danger by allowing a sociopath free range among children. This is my problem now, Haruta. You never have to worry about him again.”

What?! No. “Teira-sama, that’s not right! I—he’s mine to beat.”

“I’m sorry, Haruta, for burdening you with expectation. I see now that I was wrong in—“

“Stop it!” Haruta shouted. She felt tears well up at what she was hearing.

This sheer loss of faith she was hearing. Teira-sama giving up on her. Treating her no differently than a mere non-sorcerer. Just another victim to be protected.

“You don’t have to hold my hand like I’m a child, Teira! I’m a sorcerer, just like you! I risk my life of my own free will to be a sorcerer! So quit coddling me already!” she roared.

Teira’s ambassador Juchū frowned in sympathy.

She hated the sight of that expression.

“If I die, then I die,” Haruta went on. "If I flourish, then I’ll flourish. But you don’t get to apologize to me for giving me what I asked of you. I want to be strong, and to be strong, then I need this pressure. And I need you to get off my back, already!”

The hall was quiet. All too quiet.

She would bet that Gakuganji had heard her shouts. How embarrassing. Damnit, Teira, why do you have to embarrass me like that?

The silence drew on for too long for her comfort. She continued quietly.

“Thank you…” Haruta said. “For sticking up for me. But I expected that you’d yell at me for being weak. And careless. I would have hated to hear that, of course. But… I hate hearing this way more.”

It was like the entire world conspired to keep her weak. That stupid Matsuda for stopping the fight, and now Teira-sama for letting go of all her expectations. It was infuriating!

“I understand. My apologies for taking you too lightly. It is clear that you’re already a sorcerer worthy of the name. Very well. I’ll stop stifling you with my presence.”

“Thank you, Teira-sama,” Haruta said.

“…I expected you to be more regretful about my leaving.”

“Thank you, Teira-sama.” Regret with regards to her leaving were the last thing on her mind! She just wanted her to leave already.

The Ambassador Juchū just smiled. “Goodbye.”

000

Later that evening…

The head of the Zen'in clan, Zen'in Naobito, watched in mild amusement as Gojo Manjiro, the head of the Gojo clan, drank straight from a porcelain bottle of sake. Kamo Akihito, fellow clan head, snorted at the sight.

They met in one of Jujutsu High’s private meeting rooms, the space warded to prevent any listeners or prying eyes. In effect, the room had been proofed to prevent Gojo Satoru and Hibana Teira from spying.

Traditionally, the barriers for these spaces were to prevent Tengen from watching. The Big Three didn’t have an adversarial relationship to Tengen, but it was simply the principle of the matter. It wouldn’t do for such lofty personages to allow such vulnerabilities.

“The plan is canceled, then,” Naobito said.

Manjiro said nothing.

“If Gojo Satoru won’t cooperate, then all is truly lost,” Kamo Akihito sighed. “That is a shame. This is how the Big Three clans fall. Not with a bang, but a mere whimper. And an old relic drinking his frustrations away!”

Manjiro threw the bottle at Akihito. Manjiro was barely even a sorcerer. Presumably, the heavens had decreed that the sum total of the Gojo clan’s talent would go to the Six Eyes whelp, which made both him and every other sorcerer in his family worth less than dogshit. Akihito grabbed the bottle and took his own swig from it.

But he made no moves to retaliate. For while Manjiro was weak, there was really no telling what Gojo Satoru would do should the Kamo clan suddenly assault his head.

“Tell it true, old man,” Naobito sighed. “They made friends, didn’t they?”

“She seduced him!”

Naobito laughed. Seduced? Her? They had all gotten good looks of Hibana Teira through the many different ways that the Big Three clans had to surveil the classrooms. Barriers, cursed techniques. They had watched the big fight raptly, noting down every detail of Teira’s playbook—including Satoru’s, of course. Especially Satoru’s.

Though much of what had happened inside the Domain hadn’t been clear, one thing had definitely happened—Gojo Satoru had broken it from the inside.

Naobito was closer to Gojo Satoru and Hibana Teira than the average non-sorcerer was to him, but at times like this, he had to wonder how true this even was.

Fastest sorcerer of the modern day… give me a break. Naobito doubted that he was fast enough to match up against those ant-like Juchū, let alone Gojo Satoru.

In any case, Naobito doubted that Teira was any boy’s type. It was less about how she appeared—and he would never be so crass as to criticize a young teenaged girl’s appearance in the first place—and more on how she carried herself as a person. Where many women in power did, indeed, rely on seduction and diplomacy to win allies over, Teira appealed to allies in the same way that a strong man would—by sheer virtue of her power.

Anyone would be blind to misattribute her soft power as ‘feminine wiles’.

Gojo Satoru was an outlier even among the one other fully-fledged Special Grade of this generation, Tsukumo Yuki. Naobito could not imagine that woman beating Satoru. He was the reason why they had even considered creating classifications beyond Special Grade in the first place.

Hibana Teira was a fellow outlier of his caliber. Perhaps even more so, in how much she had influenced Jujutsu Society, and Japan as a whole. It was almost unheard of for non-sorcerers to die to cursed spirits in the big cities and towns nowadays. Most of that carnage seemed concentrated in hard-to-reach places in the sticks.

“All hope is not lost,” Akihito said. He grinned. “Indeed, our fortune might yet turn.”

He was likely referring to that one Blood Manipulator in Kyoto. Naobito had heard of him. He’d also heard of the Kamo clan’s many attempts at courting the little shit. He’d turned all offers down.

But from the sound of things, Naobito hazarded a guess that the boy was no longer in a position to deny any favors, no matter how many strings were attached.

Right. Good luck with that.

Naobito stood up. “I’ll head on home to grieve our losses. We tried our best, but it’s too bad. Ah well.”

“Don’t act like this doesn’t concern you,” Manjiro growled.

“Of course it does,” Naobito said.

The only difference was in their ways of dealing with this changing of winds. Naobito would choose to adapt rather than test fate against the likes of Hibana Teira.

He had more or less gotten a measure of her character. She fought for the sake of humanity, upholding the core tenets of Jujutsu tradition. Beyond that, she was a force for progression the likes of which couldn’t be ignored.

The same way all the fearmongering of communism and labor rights had won women increased rights in the mid twentieth century, the same way that industry had folded women into the workforce en masse in order to feed the machine of production in the non-sorcerer world, Hibana Teira was a force that would drag Jujutsu Sorcery to a new era, kicking and screaming.

Naobito had been old enough to see the shift in tendencies with his own eyes. He had been old enough to even fear it, and lament these changes. He would even wager that he was too old now to change his ways. Too old to ever look at a women and not think less of them.

No, not quite. Not ‘less’, but in a capacity that they would view as less. A capacity that he was comfortable with.

The world, however, was an uncomfortable place. And damn the world for that. Still, he wouldn’t damn it to the point of forgetting that the world remained ruthlessly unsympathetic to his own will.

As he exited the room, he maintained this idea: a pivot.

How exactly would he pivot?

He groaned to himself, rubbing the back of his head. Dammit if I have even the slightest clue.

With the arrival of all that newblood, the obvious thing to do would be to pander to their sensibilities. And offer them something in return for loyalty. Sponsorships. Not money, of course, but instruction. Whether they were a girl or a boy, they’d get the same amount out of the sponsorship.

That worked for Naobito.